The novel's only real consciousness — everyone else is seen through his eyes, at his age, in his vocabulary. Stephen is brilliant, oversensitive, frequently unlikeable, and entirely consistent: from the child who goes to the rector to the young man who refuses the priest's vocation, he is always the same person — someone who will not submit to authority he cannot justify to himself. His aesthetic theory in Chapter Five is both his great achievement and his limitation: it explains art better than it enables him to make any.